“Game of Thrones! History, Medievalism and How It Might End”, Professor Carolyne Larrington (University of Oxford)

Date: Wednesday 26 October, 2016
Time: 5:30pm–6:30pm
Venue: Woolley Common Room (First Floor, John Woolley Building A20), The University of Sydney
Enquiries: Craig Lyons (craig.lyons@sydney.edu.au)

In this lecture I’ll talk about watching and writing about HBO’s Game of Thrones as a medieval scholar. I’ll also explain some of the medieval history and literature from which George R. R. Martin chiselled the building blocks for the construction of his imaginary world. Game of Thrones has now become the most frequently streamed or downloaded show in TV history. I’ll suggest some reasons for its enormous international success as the medieval fantasy epic for the twenty-first century, and will undertake a little speculation on how the show might end.

Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, and teaches medieval English literature as a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely on Old Icelandic literature, including the leading translation into English of the Old Norse Poetic Edda (2nd edn, Oxford World’s Classics, 2014). She also researches medieval European literature: two recent publications are Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York Medieval Press, 2015) and an edited collection of essays (with Frank Brandsma and Corinne Saunders), Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2015). She also writes on the medieval in the modern world: two recent books are The Land of the Green Man (2015) on folklore and landscape in Great Britain, and Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), both published by I. B. Tauris. She is currently researching emotion in secular medieval European literatures, and planning a second book about Game of Thrones.

“Medea’s Pathological Passions: Seneca’s Dramatic Inversion of Stoicism”, Tara Auty (UWA)

Date: 20 September, 2016
Time: 1:00pm
Venue: Arts Lecture Room 6 (G.62, ground floor, Arts Building), University of Western Australia

This is a free event. You don’t need to RSVP – just come along.

Traditionally, Seneca’s Medea has been problematised when considered against his prose works. However, recent scholarship has shown that, far from showcasing the failure of Stoicism, Medea inverts the ideals advanced in Seneca’s prose works in order to prove the effectiveness of Stoic philosophy by that very inversion. This paper will demonstrate that Medea is not a character whose reason succumbs to her passions, but rather, that her passions in fact arise from a from a system of reasoning that is internally coherent. The development and sustenance of her passions from and through her reason can thus be read as evidence of one of the most basic tenets of Stoicism, that emotions are based on value judgements. Her practise of constancy – advocated by Seneca to foster consistent character – consolidates her motives and solidifies her drive, so that she develops from being a character temporarily experiencing certain emotions to a character defined by the permanency of those emotions.

Tara Auty is a PhD candidate in Classics and Ancient History at The University of Western Australia (UWA), working under the umbrella of the Languages and Emotion research cluster, contributing to both the Meanings and Change programs of ARC CHE. Her current research project for her PhD, due in 2018, is a study of the effect of community emotions in response to the Fall of Constantinople on the production of neo-Latin epic in the Quattrocento. This project benefits from, and contributes to, fields as varied as scholarship on Latin Humanism, the study of Classical Latin epic, early Modern Italian history, and the cultural history of the emotions.

“Punishment as Help and Blaming Emotions,” Professor Annalise Acorn (Faculty of Law, University of Alberta, Canada)

Date: 26 September, 2016 (preceding the ‘Emotions in Legal Practices: Historical and Modern Attitudes Compared’ conference on 27–28 September 2016).
Time: 6:00pm–7:30pm
Venue: Law School Foyer, Level 2, New Law School, Eastern Avenue, The University of Sydney
Cost: Free and open to all with online registrations required: http://whatson.sydney.edu.au/events/published/sydney-ideas-professor-annalise-acorn
Enquiries: Sydney Ideas (sydney.ideas@sydney.edu.au) ARC Centre for the History of Emotions (jacquie.bennett@adelaide.edu.au)

In this paper I argue that criminal punishment, devoid of all emotions of blame, is inhuman in relation to the offender and contrary to a morally robust justification for the criminal law. Increasingly, progressive philosophers of punishment, such as Hannah Pickard, Nicola Lacey and Martha Nussbaum, claim that emotions such as anger and resentment have no place in criminal punishment. Lacey and Pickard in particular argue that punishment should be carried out through an ethic of forgiveness.

I argue that these rejections of the emotions of blame in punishment, though they claim to be new and improved, are grounded in the ancient and Aristotelian idea that punishment to be different from revenge must be for the benefit of the wrongdoer. This conceptualisation of punishment as help has also long been connected to a view of wrongdoing as illness and punishment as cure. I argue that Lacey and Pickard’s view is a distinctively twenty-first-century therapeutic version of these age-old ideas. I argue that the impulse to punish an offender with the expression of affective blame is not at all inconsistent with the intention to help the offender. Further, I question the assumption that being on the receiving end of affective blame is necessarily unhelpful to a wrongdoer. From there I argue that an ethic that eschews affective blame in favour of detached forgiveness deprives human relations of the Strawsonian good of unreserved mutuality and moral engagement. While such unreserved moral mutuality may be difficult within the relation between the state and the criminal wrongdoer, a criminal sentence intended convey no affective blame would be morally unintelligible to both the offender and society.

Professor Annalise Acorn is Professor of Law at the University of Alberta. In 2014–2015 she was a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford where she worked on a book on resentment and responsibility. She is the author of Compulsory Compassion: A Critique of Restorative Justice (2004).

Professor Acorn’s main area of research interest is the theory of the emotions in the context of conflict and justice. She has published numerous articles in journals such as The Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Valparaiso Law Review, and the UCLA Women’s Law Journal. In 1998–1999 she was the president of the Canadian Association of Law Teachers. In the same year she was a McCalla Research Professor.

This event is co-presented by Sydney Ideas and the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions for the conference ‘Emotions in Legal Practices’.

“The Emotional Object: The Materiality of Friendship, Longing and Trust Among Dutch Migrants in Denmark and Beyond”, Dr Jette Linaa (Moesgaard Museum, Denmark)

Date: Monday 12 September, 2016
Time: 2:00-4:00pm
Venue: Philippa Maddern Seminar Room, Arts 1.33, The University of Western Australia
Registration: This is a free event but places are limited due to the venue. Please RSVP to Pam Bond if you wish to attend.

This seminar/workshop is organised by the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, in conjunction with the Discipline of Archeology at The University of Western Australia, with objects kindly supplied by the Western Australian Museum.

The presence of foreign material culture is abundantly documented in many Danish archaeological publications, and written sources speak clearly of large and influential diaspora communities, mainly of German and Dutch origin, occupying elite positions in many Scandinavian urban centers. Especially the 16th century saw a marked increase, and up to one third of the citizens of the larger cities were of foreign origin around 1600.

Nevertheless, foreign objects (books, paintings and prints and porcelain cups as well as Italian and Spanish majolica plates and jars) have rarely been seen in an ethnic/cultural framework as representing evidence of the emotions of these foreigners, negotiation feelings of loss, community, friendship and trust through the use and exchange of objects. In Danish historical archaeology these objects have seen as evidence of trade; the presence of immigrants has barely been investigated and the emotional significance of these objects are so far under researched. This seminar challenges this by focusing on the emotional value of these objects as tokens of friendship, longing and trust based on the following research questions:

• Who possessed the objects?
• What were the emotional value of these objects?
• How did the emotional value formed over time and how is this mirrored in the material culture that we know from history and archaeology?
• How did the emotional objects negotiate feelings of longing, friendship and trust in the migrant worldview?

Dr. Jette Linaa is a curator in Historical Archaeology at Moesgaard Museum, Denmark and a lecturer at the Department of Archaeology, University of Aarhus and at the Department of Maritime Archaeology at the University of Southern Denmark. She is currently the head of the Danish Council for Independent Research/Humanities project: Urban Diaspora: Diaspora Communities and Materiality in Early Modern Urban centres (2014-2017). This cross-national and cross-disciplinary research project unites 14 archaeologists, historians and scientists from 10 universities and museum in Denmark, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands in the first large-scale effort to explore the materiality of migration in Scandinavia and beyond 1400-1700.

“Transmitting Ideas to the Peripheries: Scandinavian Texts and their European Context in the Later Middle Ages”, Dr Kimberley Knight (University of Sydney)

Date: Wednesday 31 August, 2016
Time: 4:00-5:30pm
Venue: SLC Common Room, Brennan McCallum Building (5th floor, Room 536), The University of Sydney

“City, Nation, and Globalisation in the Medieval World”, Professor Helen Fulton (University of Bristol)

Date: Wednesday 7 September, 2016
Time: 5:00-7:00pm
Venue: Rogers Room, Woolley Building (A22), The University of Sydney
More information and RSVP: helene.sirantoine@sydney.edu.au

This lecture suggests that modern debates about globalisation and the decline of the nation state are prefigured by the medieval condition of loosely-defined nations which pre-dated the nation state. It discusses evidence of ‘globalisation’ as an economic and ideological phenomenon articulated in medieval literary texts. In the Middle Ages, before the establishment of the nation state as the dominant model of political organisation, city and empire were the defining frameworks of social and political relations, with international trade providing a global network of shared ideologies. Now, once again, in the ‘post-national’ age of globalisation, national boundaries are becoming permeable and the global city provides the major framework of social and cultural identity.

Helen Fulton is Professor of Medieval Literature at the University of Bristol. She is the Convenor of the Bristol Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and WUN Research Group, ‘Borders and Borderlands in Medieval and Early Modern Europe’.

“Game of Thrones! History, Medievalism and How It Might End”, Professor Carolyne Larrington (University of Oxford)

Date: Monday 17 October 2016
Time: 6:00–7:00pm
Venue: Alexander Lecture Theatre (G.57, Ground Floor, Arts Building), The University of Western Australia
Registration: Online bookings essential ($12 standard registration; $10 concession/unwaged/student)
Enquiries: Joanne McEwan (joanne.mcewan@uwa.edu.au)

In this lecture I’ll talk about watching and writing about HBO’s Game of Thrones as a medieval scholar. I’ll also explain some of the medieval history and literature from which George R. R. Martin chiselled the building blocks for the construction of his imaginary world. Game of Thrones has now become the most frequently streamed or downloaded show in TV history. I’ll suggest some reasons for its enormous international success as the medieval fantasy epic for the twenty-first century, and will undertake a little speculation on how the show might end.

This event is hosted by the Society for the History of Emotions and the UWA Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies. Proceeds will go towards the establishment of the new Society for the History of Emotions journal, Emotions: History, Culture, Society.

Carolyne Larrington is Professor of Medieval European Literature at the University of Oxford, and teaches medieval English literature as a Fellow of St John’s College. She has published widely on Old Icelandic literature, including the leading translation into English of the Old Norse Poetic Edda (2nd edn, Oxford World’s Classics, 2014). She also researches medieval European literature: two recent publications are Brothers and Sisters in Medieval European Literature (York Medieval Press, 2015) and an edited collection of essays (with Frank Brandsma and Corinne Saunders), Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature (D. S. Brewer, 2015). She also writes on the medieval in the modern world: two recent books are The Land of the Green Man (2015) on folklore and landscape in Great Britain, and Winter is Coming: The Medieval World of Game of Thrones (2015), both published by I. B. Tauris. She is currently researching emotion in secular medieval European literatures, and planning a second book about Game of Thrones.

RN Books and Arts Live: Shakespeare in Contemporary Culture with Peter Holbrook and Sarah Kanowski

Date: Thursday 8 September, 2016
Time: 4:00pm
Venue: Auditorium 1, SLQ, Level 2, State Library of Queensland
Cost: Free. Book tickets here: https://uplit.com.au/bookings/book?presenter=AUBWF&event=16143

Join RN Books and Arts Sarah Kanowski as she discusses the work and influence of William Shakespeare 400 years after his death with Professor Peter Holbrook, Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at the University of Queensland.

Some of Professor Holbrook’s recent publications include English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom (London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2015) and Shakespeare’s Creative Legacies: Artists, Writers, Performers, and Readers, co-edited with Paul Edmondson (London: Bloomsbury/Arden Shakespeare, 2016). Shakespeare’s Individualism appeared with Cambridge University Press in the U.K. in 2010. Fans of the Bard are encouraged to celebrate all things Shakespeare at this very special free event.

Peter Holbrook is a Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance Literature at The University of Queensland, and directs a research unit there focused on the history of emotions Peter is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and has written widely for the print media.

Sarah Kanowski presents the Books and Arts program on ABC RN on Saturdays. She has a Masters Degree in English from Oxford University, has edited Island magazine in Tasmania and also herded goats in Chile.

New Norcia Library Lecture

Date: Friday, 14 October, 2016
Venue: New Norcia Library, New Norcia Benedictine Community, WA
Cost: Costs; $80 per librarian and $40 per student, The day includes a cemetery tour, lunch, morning and afternoon tea and the sessions. Tickets numbers are limited to 100.
Tickets: http://www.newnorcia.wa.edu.au/products/group/events-and-special-items/26

Dr Toby Burrows, Manager of the eResearch Support Unit in Information Services, University of Western Australia, will be introducing us to events and places into which manuscripts survive. He worked for two years in the U.K. with manuscripts and their stories from the dispersed collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps.

The Little Free Library movement is making tracks in W.A. Soraya Majidi of Albany Public Library and Laura Parker of Gingin will offer insights into a library service that fulfils a niche. Their consequential experiences alert us to potential dynamics and social benefits another means of outreach may bring to our communities.

Former, long term New Norcia Librarian, Sue Johnson will be your guide for this year’s opportunity to learn about a different aspect of New Norcia’s history — an after lunch tour of the New Norcia cemetery.

Clare Menck, author of Mundaring Weir forestry settlement, 1923-2011, will also take us into the labyrinth of social outcomes — the challenges of producing “readable” reports that seek to avoid being mere “dust collectors”. The report that Clare will use to illustrate her ideas is now available as an e-book, via the State Library of Western Australia catalogue: http://purl.slwa.wa.gov.au/slwa_b4505139_1